Problem with Keyword Cannibalization ( and Possible Solutions)

Hello everyone, I am working on the SEO of a service website where another IM team had created keyword cannibalization problems in the past. Basically, there are pages with targeted keywords that are being outranked by the website’s home page. In my opinion, that happened due to a combination of far greater number of links on homepage and anchor text misuse. Based on your previous experience, what would you rather do out of the following solutions?



A) Adding even more links on homepage with LSI keyword anchor text. What I get is, exploiting the link juice of homepage but sacrificing a bit in relevancy and leaving traces during link building due to keyword anchor text.



B) Adding links on the pages optimized for the keywords. This time I get, far less link juice but it is extremely relevant to the keyword.



C) A hybrid solution where pages ranked in top 40 I will use method A, and with the rest method B.



D) Twist of your own.



Please share your opinion. Thank you for your time.

if it's indeed keyword cannibalization it should first be fixed with onpage SEO, not backlinks. I would check (and modify if needed) the meta tags and keywords used for the homepage and inner pages (remove the keywords you want to rank for, from the homepage while also updating the meta tags of each page accordingly).

If they're already done, I don't know the solution, maybe someone else can help you...

Are you sure it’s not a content silo of supporting content to drive relevancy to the homepage itself?

You're going to want to dilute your current keyword profile or topics with other keywords. So, take & edit one of the articles that are attempting to rank for the same keywords (take the article that was created more recent/less ranked) and insert a few other keywords & minimize the usage of the main keyword your other articles have.